Western Digital looks to cloud for growth opportunities

Western Digital is a big name in data storage. The company has just released a 20 terabyte desktop hard drive called MyBook Duo.

Some of its more popular storage devices are the external hard drives which, now, seem limited in comparison – being, as they are, from 1 or 2 TB to 8 to 12 TB.

The new, 20-TB RAID storage system, available on the WD website for $850, is designed to give both consumers and professionals the capacity they need to keep up with their expanding digital content libraries and the performance to maintain pace with the speed of today’s small business landscape, says the company.

Sven Rathjen, vice president of product marketing, client solutions, Western Digital, says: “Both at home and in the office, people are creating and amassing huge volumes of data, and need high capacity, high speed solutions to easily and confidently move and store that data in a single location.

“We see it within new content creation segments such as the drone market and with enthusiasts, as well as professionals, producing and editing massive, high-quality photo and video files.

“There has never been more of a need for a simple-to-use, massive capacity desktop storage solution such as My Book Duo for these content creators to keep pace with their growing storage demands.”

WD has also been on the acquisition trail recently, and one of its purchases indicate the company’s possible interest in developing its presence in the cloud storage market.

The acquisitions look to be aimed at supporting WD’s ActiveScale P100 system, which enables the creation and scaling of petabytes-level data storage repositories across both on-premise and hosted cloud architectures.

Dave Tang, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Systems business unit, Western Digital, said when launching ActiveScale P100: “We have integrated the fundamental building blocks of storage to create solutions for the market that will help customers extract greater value from increasing volumes of data.

“The capacity and value delivered by the ActiveScale P100 makes cloud-scale repositories and big data analytics economically feasible and accessible to virtually every application and industry.

“With our entire product portfolio, we’re changing how enterprises and cloud service providers deploy, scale and manage cloud-scale data centers. Our turnkey systems enable businesses to shift their focus from building infrastructure to harnessing the power of data for their customers or organizations.”